Looking up and looking down: Weighting good and bad information in life satisfaction judgments

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Citation:

Diener, E., Lucas, R. E., Oishi, S., & Suh, E. M. (2002). Looking up and looking down: Weighting good and bad information in life satisfaction judgments. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin 28(4), 437-445.

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Abstract:

In two large international studies, the authors examined whether happy and unhappy individuals weighted life domains differently when constructing life satisfaction judgments. In both studies, regression equations predicting life satisfaction showed that there were significant interactions between happiness and a person’s best domain and between happiness and a person’s worst domain, even after controlling for participants’ standing on all other domains. Happy participants weighted their best domains more heavily than did unhappy individuals, whereas unhappy individuals weighted their worst domains more heavily than did happy individuals. Thus, happy and unhappy people used different information when constructing satisfaction judgments.

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